Not quite a Ronald Reagan, Carl Sagan, San Diegan Pagan, since I live in Los Angeles.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Fwd: Living in a time of clashing ideologies

It's not always pleasant living in the crucible of clashing ideologies

DECEMBER 23, 2012 I've tried with moderate success to stay away from gun control posts. To the extent I have posted on the subject, it hasn't been to develop my own ideas but, instead, to introduce you to other people's writing on the subject. The top of that list, of course, is Larry Correia's answer to the anti-gun crowd, written from the useful perspective of someone who actually knows about guns. I urge all of you to read it. Moreover, if you won't end up getting to much grief from people who don't want their closed minds opened, I think you ought to share it around.

The problem for me is that closing my eyes to the gun control debate means tuning out of the world around me. As is always the case, my Facebook friends (whom I find extremely useful when I want to get a snapshot of Progressive thinking) are deluging Facebook with gun control posters. Here are the three most popular:

To be honest, I have absolutely no idea what point that last one is supposed to make. It's utterly fatuous, and it speaks very poorly of a political ideology that so many people find this meaningful enough to express their "deep" political thinking.

The second poster is false by omission. Ft. Hood was indeed a military base -- except that the shooter went for a weapon free zone, in which nobody had immediate access to arms. The same holds true for Virginia Tech. Having a police station nearby is meaningless when someone is shooting without a somewhat distant gun free zone. (Also, if it's anything like the police department I remember from my UC Berkeley days, the police weren't armed.) Finally, Columbine did have an armed guard who tried taking out the two shooters and undoubtedly slowed them down. How much more effective would it have been if there had been more armed people to strike against those shooters?

Finally, the first poster simply represents a world view that police are bad. I don't think they're bad at all; I just did think that even the best police can't be everywhere at once. More than that, I find this hostility to police -- who are, after all, an arm of Big Government -- funny coming from a crowd that is in thrall to Big Government ideology.

My Facebook friends were also shocked and disgusted that the NRA would propose something as utterly stupid as armed guards in the schools. They and their friends fell completely silent when I pointed out to them that this idea originated with Bill Clinton after Columbine and that Obama de-funded it. Whoops!

This poster effectively sums up the differences between the two ideologies currently at war in this country. The war goes far beyond the Second Amendment. Instead, it pits a world view that believes in self-reliance against a world view that devoutly hopes that, if/when trouble comes, some white knight with a government ID will come riding to the rescue . . . eventually.